What makes a meme take off? The 3 rules of virality

It’s hard to know what the first “viral” idea was. Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism certainly spread quickly, as did capitalism, the scientific method, and the nation-state. But these aren’t “viral” ideas in the sense that most people would understand them. To be viral is tied to some kind of media — a book, a newspaper, or a video.

Well, in this case, the first “viral” idea was probably Martin Luther’s “Ninety-five Theses.” Luther hammered his heretical manifesto to a church door in Wittenberg at the same time the printing press was lumbering up. Within months, his small-town scribblings had begun the great schism known as the Reformation. It’s somewhat like someone with 43 followers on Twitter posting, “50 things wrong with American democracy,” and it leading to civil war by Christmas.

These days, “viral” is reserved almost entirely for the internet. It’s about memes, cultural moments, and sharing links over Instagram. In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with philosopher Idil Galip about what makes a meme a meme and what makes something “viral.”

What Galip revealed is that the old, traditional ways to virality might be changing.

A new form of communication

To understand what makes a meme go viral, we have to understand what a meme is. A meme is a strange phenomenon in that it’s a combination of both language and art. In the days before the internet, you talked with words and hinted with your body language. If someone was annoying you or making you happy, you’d laugh or say “Stop that.” You wouldn’t hand them a photo of a reaction meme.

Memes are a kind of artistic language. They are art in that they involve images or videos, and often involve a degree of editing and collage talent. “Anyone can make a meme” is true in the same way that “Anyone can make The Starry Night.” And yet, somehow, not everyone can. But they are language in that we use them to convey a meaning with often far more depth and nuance than even a phonetic counterpoint.

Consider, below, the “This is fine!” meme.

You’ll find this posted around the internet, on social media, and in comments sections. It’s very hard to represent it easily in words. For those who don’t know this meme, it’s meant to be a kind of Panglossian positivity combined with willful ignorance, while everything around you is crumbling and burning. That’s a complex thing to convey in only a few words. What’s more, there will be some readers who think I’ve misrepresented the meme, which is the point. Memes have a depth, texture, and nuance to them that you only really find in poetry, literature, and art.

The three rules of virality

So, if we know that a meme is a kind of communication using art, then we can further isolate what makes a “good” meme, and a “good” meme often becomes a viral one.

Galip identified three main components that make a meme go viral.

First, it is surprising. A good meme stops you from scrolling. It stands out from all the other “content” out there and has that “I-need-to-share-this” feeling to it. It might take a piece of popular culture and reappropriate it to some new end. It might be something that shocks you in how brazen, revolting, cute, or insightful it is. It might twist an old, existing piece of culture to a new, surprising end. “Unpredictability makes something funnier,” Galip put it, “that kind of sense of unpredictable joy or unpredictable laughter or unpredictable anger. Any unpredictable feeling.”

Second, it is relatable. Memes have to have a near-universal application. A Japanese student on the subway to work and an Argentinian farmer resting in the shade of a tree both have to look at a meme and think, “That’s so me.” Often, a meme will speak to some universal human emotion or will be one of those feelings that hasn’t really got a name yet. Galip gave an example of a meme where shampoo bottles are applauding you for saying some witty, brilliant line in the shower. That’s relatable.

Third, it is versatile. Being surprising and relatable increases the chances of a meme being shared, but for a meme to go viral, it needs to be seen. And to be seen, a meme has to appear everywhere. This is why a meme needs to have a degree of either versatility or customizability. The best memes are those that have a “meme creator” somewhere online. The “One Does Not…” Lord of the Rings meme is so good because almost every aspect of life has a “this is ridiculously hard to do” element that people think is easy.

One does not simply make a viral meme

Of course, the problem is that many of these features are only identifiable in reverse. We can list the most successful memes of all time and isolate these components. “Oh,” we say, “that obviously chimed in with this cultural phenomenon happening elsewhere.” It’s much harder to constantly create and release “viral” memes. It’s much harder to make a winner all the time.

That is, until recently. One of the curious trends Galip talked about was how meme virality is becoming less organic and more engineered. It used to be that memes were a kind of modern-day folklore: spontaneous, bottom-up, and hard to predict. They swirled around communities and took on the role of an internet vernacular.

Now, memes are becoming something more calculated, where a “meme” can go “viral” if it’s algorithmically farmed, tweaked, and promoted. As Galip put it, “there’s one surefire way of getting a viral meme, and that’s if you have bots and meme factories and meme armies constantly boosting a certain meme.” Not so much folklore evolving naturally around a campfire, but propaganda dropped from planes.

The question is whether we can still call these artificial “memes” memes at all. Part of the definition of a meme is the organic, democratic element of virality. Memes are a part of internet culture, and it’s a culture that belongs to everyone on the internet. An artificial “meme” might be surprising, relatable, and versatile, but it will also feel hollow, cynical, and commercial. A meme, like all language, belongs to its users. And that sense of decentralized, no-holds-barred kind of chaos is part of why we love them so much.